The problem here is the ego, you have to notice how Yehuda put an accent on how important his contributions to rails 3 were. I'm not arguing they're not, but as Plato put it, when you think you reached the absolute wisdom you couldnt be further from it
Oh, I see. So the problem isn't that Yehuda's asking for money, but that he had the temerity to state his qualifications.
Again, we gotta grow up. Yehuda's contributions to Rails 3 were important. What's wrong with taking credit for that? I'm often critical of the Rails community for an excess of ego, but this is not one of those cases.
It seems pretty clear that the idea of an open source developer asking for money seems vaguely filthy to a bunch of people. I think this is unhealthy and poisonous. It condemns open source to be the provence of academics, the unemployed, those able to snatch free time away from their friends and familier, or those working at the largess of their corporate employers. That's a shitty limit on the scope of free software.
I read the accent as being on his track record of delivering on open source software efforts. In other words, he's demonstrating the soundness of investing your money toward his goal. Regardless, count me in.
Part of using Kickstarter (and IndieGoGo, and the others) is establishing that you're qualified to do what you say you'll do with the crowd's money. He did exactly what he was supposed to do.
